6 Ways to Use Attribution Modeling in the Google Digital Marketing Stack

The Google Digital Marketing stack gives you a matrix of options to meet your attribution needs.

As every savvy marketing leader knows, a strong marketing program requires the ability to clearly measure ROI. It requires quantifiable efficiency, or a way to understand how your marketing dollars are impacting conversions at a level granular enough to guide optimization.

The ability to tie your media performance through to conversion, and understand with concrete metrics where to shift budget for optimal return, is the fundamental definition of marketing attribution. A more thorough definition comes from the Interactive Advertising Bureau:

Marketing Attribution is the process of identifying a set of user actions (‘events’) that contribute in some manner to a desired outcome, and then assigning value to each of these events.

Attribution is a hot topic – as an analytical instrument, value can be tied directly back to your bottom line – and its relevancy will continue to grow as more accessible modeling options are released.

But building out an attribution program can be intimidating; internally, there will be technical considerations, resourcing considerations, budgetary considerations, and even cultural considerations (How will your paid search team feel vs. your programmatic display team? What does your analytics team think? Will your direct mail department even acknowledge the tool?) And most importantly, which attribution solution is best for your needs as a company?

Answering those questions for our clients has led us to develop this series – in it, we’ll dive into six ways that your team can use attribution modeling in the Google Digital Marketing Stack for surfacing actionable insights into your customer journey.

A rule of thumb at Delve is that the best solution is the one flexible enough to adapt to your business goals. Out of box solutions can be a good starting point – they can get you most of the way there, but to truly excel in analytics you need technology agile enough to account for nuance. One size does not fit all in data.

And it’s for this reason that we’re so head over heels for the Google Digital Marketing (GDM) stack: powerful flexibility. Specifically, GDM provides native integration across a diverse set of products, which gives you enough dexterity to customize measurement to your very specific goals. This is especially important within the context of attribution, and GDM does a great job of providing you with something most competitors will not: options.